


Choriambics — I

by twobirdsonesong



Category: CrissColfer - Fandom, Glee RPF
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Established Relationship, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Prompt Fill, Road Trips, Song Lyrics, crisscolfer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 12:55:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1649390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twobirdsonesong/pseuds/twobirdsonesong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris has died and Darren mourns him in the best way he knows how.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choriambics — I

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by an anon on tumblr.

It can be a beautiful day and a tornado can still come.  The floods will rise, the hurricane will churn, the fires will burn.  The earth cracks beneath your feet.  The sun can shine and the fields be green and the violent winds can still come and sweep away everything you’ve ever loved, picking up everything in its path with impunity. In less than the space between two heart beats.

 

After it happens, after the sirens fade and the arrangements are made, Darren disappears.  His phone gets turned off and his voicemail fills up in less than two days. His house is dark, his emails go unanswered, and he is gone.

 

_He is gone._

 

Reporters track down his friends, his former cast mates, his parents.  The drive and need for sound bites from the grieving is relentless.  Darren is quiet.

 

There are memorials for Chris – public and private – and Darren shows up at none of them. The rest of the cast does, and they release the necessary and desired statements about the loss of their friend through their teams.  But Darren remains silent.  Gone. The world buzzes at that and no one offers an explanation for his pointed absence between the days of mourning.

 

There are rumors, whispers that he’s in the studio – somewhere in New York, Memphis, some producer’s living room in the valley – but no one can confirm anything and no one sees him at all.  He is gone.

 

It takes two months.  Two months of media speculation that spills into disrespectful and invasive hounding from all sides. Two months of no one being able to say anything at all about what happened to him, where he went, why it’s been so long.  Why at all; what it means. Two months of radio silence from Darren himself before he is seen again, at a dark and lonely bar outside of San Francisco.

  
There is no announcement.  No name on the marquee, no badly designed flyers on the wall.  There is nothing but an empty stage and a bearded man with a guitar who takes it with heavy feet and a hollow heart. The sparse and scattered crowd does not know him at first.  They’re not there for music; it’s not that kind of night, or that kind of place. They talk over him at first, because that’s what playing unpaid in a bar on a Thursday night means, even though the opening chords of the song are familiar to most there.

 

_Would you know my name / if I saw you in heaven? / Would it be the same / if I saw you in heaven?_

 

Darren’s voice is cracked and broken from the first note, but it does not matter. The words are the same and the meaning clear.  His fingers are sure on the strings and slowly the conversations around him die down, face turn towards him. He doesn’t hear or see them anyway. This is not for them. This is for him. His world is reduced to the guitar in his hands and wracking, aching hurt in his blood that has not gone away for two months.

 

This is for _him_.

 

The CDs appear and no one knows where they come from.  They assume Darren must bring them with him, but no one ever sees him.  They are unmarked – just a plain black case with a little silver lightning bolt in the corner. There is no name and no title and he does not sell them.  They are left on the end of the bar for anyone to pick up and take home and listen to. Or not.  He doesn’t care.

 

He’s gone almost before the song ends, off the stage and back out into the cool and misty night before anyone really knows what the hell just happened in front of them. The door is swinging shut and the last notes are still ringing across the small room before the scattered crowd remembers to breathe again.

 

Darren is back in his car and an hour outside of town before he cries. His fingertips hurt where he grips the steering wheel too tightly and he has to pull over to the side because he can no longer see the road ahead of him.  He cried before, when he got the call about Chris. And he cried at the hospital when they told him he was already gone.  And he cried when Chris’ mom let him come to the house and pick up a few things that Chris had on him when it happened.

 

He starts the car back up.  He has no plan; the future he’d mapped is gone and the past has been destroyed. All he can do is go forward all through the night.

 

He is gone.

 

Darren is somewhere in Arizona when he stops next.  It’s as good a place as any for this. He finds the first venue with something like an open mic night and walks inside.  The floors are sticky with old spilled beer and the walls still smell of 20 years of smoke.  There’s no real stage and no spot light, just a platform that creaks and groans when he steps up.

 

_I am closing the book on the pages and the text / and I don't really care of what happens next / I am just going / I am going / I am gone_

 

If Darren cries on stage, he doesn’t remember it.

 

The conversation around him changes after that night.  People swear it was him while others say it can’t have been. That someone like him would show up at a nowhere bar two months after Chris’ death after being completely missing the whole time.  No one thought to take a picture of the small man in the dark hoodie with the unkempt hair who kept his eyes cast down and didn’t say a word to anyone.  Someone asks the bartender, but he just shrugs and walks away.  It’s not his story to tell.

 

But Darren doesn’t listen to any of it.  He still hasn’t turned his phone back on.  He carries a second phone for emergencies that has three numbers in it, and one of those calls a number that doesn’t exist anymore. The CDs are left behind for anyone who needs to know what’s going on, what Chris meant to him, why he’s doing this.

 

He drives on.

 

Someone sees his car at a gas station in Texas and someone else claims he checked into a shitty motel outside of Oklahoma City.  It doesn’t mean anything.  No one knows where he’s going to turn up next.  What does it matter if they see the back of his head at a drive-thru in the middle of fucking nowhere?

  
He finds a place in St. Louis that doesn’t even have a name above the door.  It’s dark and dank and looks almost exactly the way he feels beneath his thin-stretched skin. His soul’s been burned and buried and what is left is ash in his mouth and grit in his veins.

 

No one looks at him as he takes the little stage and that’s fine with him too. He’s been looked at enough in his life. He’s already swallowing back the hot, heavy lump in his throat that he can never seem to get rid of.

 

_We won't be dancing together on the high wire / facing the lines with you at my side, oh no / We won't be breathing the smoke in the fire  / on a midway_

 

Someone tries to tip him five bucks afterwards and he cannot take it.

 

He sleeps in his car that night because he cannot bear the thought of talking to anyone at all, not even the clerk at front desk of another crappy motel. There was a man seated to his left who had brown hair and blue eyes and Darren had hated him so fiercely for a perilous moment that it choked him.  He’s dying for a face he’ll never see again and a voice he’ll never hear.

 

A bar in Chicago that he and Chris got drunk in once upon time opens its doors to him. The owner is a friend and he hugs Darren so tightly his back cracks; he’s the first person to touch Darren in months. He doesn’t say anything and doesn’t ask any questions, he doesn’t have to, and for that Darren is grateful. The silence still helps.

 

Darren touches the edge of the table that he and Chris rested their elbows on and feels the hurt fresh and bloody all over again.

 

_Thought of you as my mountain top / thought of you as my peak / Thought of you as everything I've had / but couldn't keep_

 

This time there are people there who recognize him.  He supposes it was bound to happen eventually. His beard and a darkened stage cannot hide him forever.  As the song begins he sees the flashing of cameras and knows he’s being photographed. He doesn’t need to look it up later to know that someone will have captured the necklace hanging around his neck and the little silver disk that’s resting against his chest. He doesn’t care about that either. The time for those worries is far and away, buried under fallen rock and stormy seas. 

 

When the last notes are sung, he doesn’t stop and wait.  He sees a girl holding the black CD case with the shining silver lightning bolt and he wants to take it from her hands and smash it to pieces even though he spent two months recording it.  He cannot sign anything, not now, especially not that. Everything he has to say is etched into the disc and anything more would be a lie.

 

He is gone and what remains is hollowed and lost.

 

Darren drives across the border.  When he gets to where he wants to go the little venues are near to closing and the moon is too bright in the purple and cloudless sky.  There are stars, too, but he stopped looking for those months ago. The night is dark and the winds are gathering and he still has a few songs left to sing.

 

_Hear that lonesome whippoorwill / he sounds too blue to fly / the midnight train is whining low / I'm so lonesome I could cry_

 

His voice is ragged and worn, burning with tears and the shot of whiskey he downed moments before.  The last time he was here there was someone waiting for him, but love has died with the last light and there is no one left to call his name.

 

He cannot stop in Ann Arbor, even though he knows where he’d play, and so he drives on.

 

He finds himself in Brooklyn.  Darren drives past the café where he and Chris got tea and sweet little cakes one early, foggy morning.  He sees the park they walked through one snow-dusted evening in his rearview mirror and tries not to look back again.  And he lets himself circle the block where a brownstone stands with a for-sale sign out front.  He circles twice.

 

But he is gone and the for-sale sign remains.

 

He has to wait a little while to play at the bar and it gives people enough time to see him, recognize him, despite the hair on his face and the hoodie over his hair, and to call their friends.  By the time he takes the stage there is a crowd gathered, more so than before. He ignores it. This is not for them. The songs are not for them. The CDs getting snatched off the bar counter are not for them.

 

He is gone and it’s still all for him.

 

_The show must go on / the show must go on / inside my heart is breaking / my make-up may be flaking / but my smile still stays on_

 

There is applause, which makes him uncomfortable, and he slips out the back before anyone can approach him.  A paparazzo is waiting in the parking lot and Darren ducks his head and grits his teeth and does not listen to the man asking him questions.

 

_What are you doing here? What’s with the CD? How do you feel about Chris’ accident?  What have you been doing these months?  Why didn’t you go to the memorial?_

 

He gets into his car and drives past the brownstone one last time before he gets back onto the interstate and drives.

 

He is gone and the road to what is left of home remains.

 

It ends in Clovis.  He calls Chris’ parents and his own to come to the one bar in town that Darren knows Chris ever went to.  They’d visited once, he and Chris, a few years back.  They’d gotten a few drinks and shitty burgers and Chris told him how much he hated this place, even though it was home.

 

That’s where Darren ends it.  In a divey bar in Chris’ hometown with their parents huddled in a dark and private corner.

 

_Oh don't you see that lonesome dove / sitting on an ivy tree / She's weeping for her own true love / as I shall weep for mine_

 

He cries, on stage as his trembling fingers miss chords and his crumbling voice loses the notes, sick for the past and dying for a touch he’ll never feel again.

 

Darren stands up from his stool, clears his throat.  He feels like he hasn’t spoken in an eon.  “So, this was for you.”

 

He steps off the stage and into the silence, the dim peace of it at last.


End file.
